Unlike the underground comix associated with Art Spiegelman, the mainstream
American comic book, especially in its most enduring form, which features the
serialized adventures of costumed superheroes, remains casually dismissed and
critically neglected, despite periodic bids for cultural legitimacy. Even given
their recent elevation as “graphic novels” or “sequential narratives,” comics
have not been given the kind of scholarly attention afforded the dime novel,
series romance, hard-boiled detective story, or pulp sf, much less Hollywood
cinema, that other major American mode of genre-based visual-verbal narrative.
While a fan-based criticism has flourished for decades, even in its most
above-ground forum (the elitist yet persistently anti-intellectual Comics
Journal), the work still rests on pre-critical assumptions in which authorship
is valorized as personal expression. Fan-critics often dismiss the few scholars
who make forays into comics criticism for taking too seriously material that the
fans themselves are nevertheless devoted to collecting and annotating. Writers
for and readers of The Comics Journal, Hogan’s Alley, Alter Ego, and
Wizard
remain happily oblivious to the last half-century of theoretical approaches to
popular culture. Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and feminism still await
successful application to the comics industry. Scott McCloud’s celebrated
guidebook-in-comics-form, Understanding Comics (1993), in effect initiated the
late arrival of New Criticism into comics, welcome at last but a half-century
behind the times in its concern with establishing a formal vocabulary for the
analysis of comics. His focus on form stops far short of cultural or ideological
interpretation.

While there have been (and sometimes still are) western and crime comics, among
other genres, the superhero narrative remains the mainstay of mainstream comics.
Sometimes treated as a distinct (if silly) genre of its own, these superhero
stories show a family resemblance to sf. While some superheroes are explicitly
magical, many are aliens (Superman, the Martian Manhunter), the products of
scientific accidents (Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk), or
genetic mutations (the X-Men). Superhero comics would thus seem to contain
elements of interest to sf critics, who nevertheless seldom turn to comics.
Scott Bukatman’s recent collection of essays, Matters of Gravity (2003; reviewed
in this issue), includes two illuminating essays on superhero comics; but he
assures us off the bat that “I don’t read superhero comics anymore” (48).
Earlier, Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin (Science Fiction: History, Science,
Vision [1977]) identified Superman as “the most influential science fiction
comic strip of all time” (108) and defined the non-alien Batman as an sf hero
because of the nifty gadgets in his utility belt. More recently, Brooks Landon
has included some discussion of the Hugo-winning Watchmen (1986-1987) in
Science
Fiction After 1900 (1995), and Brian Attebery has considered Wonder Woman in
Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002)—this despite her mythological rather
than scientific origins. (Curiously, Attebery’s discussion of “Super Men” omits
Krypton’s favorite son.) Such references are, however friendly, at best glancing
and superficial, but they are an improvement on the somewhat embarrassed
admissions by writers such as Lance Olson (in Veronica Hollinger and Joan
Gordon’s Edging Into the Future [2002]) that “as a kid [he] didn’t read a lot of
science fiction, except in the form of awful comic books” (47). Even such
retrospective disdain may be preferable to blatant carelessness, such as when,
in Science Fiction Film (2001), J.P. Telotte identifies Captain Marvel as a
title published by Marvel Comics (rather than Fawcett, the publisher of the
character he means), while identifying the comic’s creators Bill Parker and C.C.
(Charles Clarence) Beck (later also its writer) as “Otto O. Binder and Clyde
[sic] Beck” (72), small errors in a book devoted to sf film, and yet sf fans
wouldn’t tolerate blithe references to “H.G. Welles and Phillip M. Dick.”
Although it seems clear that comics and sf fandom overlap, a scholar of the
latter, Camille Bacon-Smith (in Science Fiction Culture [2000]), reports an sf
convention organizer referring to Alan Moore’s Watchmen as The Watchman [sic]
(168); whether the two errors in what should be a one-word title are hers or
his, they remain uncorrected in her text.

My assumption is that many sf critics, having more or less won the hard-fought
battle to legitimate a body of popular fiction, continue to keep comics at arm’s
length because they require a form to position beneath the texts they have
elevated. Superhero comics often resemble the pulp-fiction space operas that
defined sf’s still embarrassing pre-adolescence, not coincidentally the period
in their own maturation when many critics consumed comics most ardently.
Although newspaper articles proclaiming that “comics aren’t just for kids
anymore” have appeared for at least the past twenty years, sf fans often seem to
have missed those reports, and the loudly declared preference for hard sf or
cyberpunk over illustrated stories of men in tights is viewed as an individual’s
(as well as a subculture’s) putting away of childish things.

One difficulty in considering superhero comics as sf arises from the fact that
their science is minimal if not laughable: most Marvel characters were “mutated”
by exposure to “radioactive” rays, spiders, or chemicals—‘nuff said. There were
once, of course, unambiguous sf comics, such as EC’s Weird Science (1950-1953)
and the newspaper strips Buck Rogers (1929-1967) and Flash Gordon (1934-1993).
These did resemble the pulp sf of their eras, in part because the two forms in
those days sometimes shared writers. The always ambivalent relation between sf
readers and sf films has also perhaps been strained by the hijacking of recent
sf cinema by comic book adaptations, though few sf fans, unlike comics fans,
have recognized the suspicious similarities between The Matrix (1999) and Grant
Morrison’s audacious precursor comic The Invisibles (1996-2000), which was
itself, like so much else these days, deeply indebted to Philip K. Dick. But I
mainly suspect that the sf critics who overlook or dismiss contemporary
superhero comics simply haven’t read any in a while, at least since an
obligatory reading of Watchmen years ago. Assuming that comics still more or
less resemble those read decades ago (because, after all, the characters are
still the same), such critics have remained unaware of the complexity of comics
today.

The texts under review here on mainstream comics (still more or less defined by
the dominant publishing houses of DC and Marvel) suggest some ways in which
comics might be more productively interpreted by the sf community. Previous work
on comics has focused on such elements as formal aspects (R. C. Harvey and David
Carrier), the dynamics of comic fandom (Jeffrey A. Brown, Matthew J. Pustz), and
comic books in relation to American social history (William W. Savage, Jr., Amy
Kiste Nyberg, and Bradford W. Wright). A few critical texts have focused on
specific comic creators (Art Spiegelman’s Jack Cole and Plasticman [2001]) or
characters (Will Brooker’s Batman Unmasked [2000]). In a field with so little
broken ground, most such studies can be fairly called groundbreaking. Yet none
(with the possible exception of Richard Reynolds’s modest but illuminating Super
Heroes: A Modern Mythology [1992]) go far towards establishing the meaning of
comics as cultural and aesthetic texts.

The works under review here celebrate the oeuvre of a major author, Alan Moore;
only one of them (Klock’s) takes a broader, more theorized approach. Within the
underdeveloped world of comics criticism, where heroic but often uncritical
enthusiasm continues to battle the arch-villain of theoretical interpretation,
Klock’s approach is innovative, as my concluding discussion will show. To turn
first to the works on Moore, however, is to be reminded of the comic industry’s
comparatively recent development of the “direct market,” which serves readers
through comic book shops rather than the antiquated newsstand or drugstore rack.
The direct market, while dependent on the appeal of brand names, has encouraged
the rise of a star system of comics creators, which first developed around the
figures of Frank Miller and Alan Moore and has sustained the careers of
subsequent writers such as Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis. Among this group,
Miller is the only American; it’s an oft-noted fact that contemporary American
comics are dominated by writers and artists from Great Britain (see, for
instance, John Newsinger’s letter on the role of comic books in the British Boom
[SFS #92, 31:1:174-75]). While many of these British writers are prolific, none is
more so than Alan Moore, whose status within the comics industry is unrivaled.
His name is known outside comics fandom as well through the success of Watchmen
and, more recently, as the author of the comic versions of From Hell (1989-1998,
collected in 1999) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2000 in its
first series), both adapted for the screen (all comics fans agree) with little
respect for or understanding of the superior originals. Now fifty years old and
threatening to retire from mainstream comics, Moore is the subject of three of
the recent books under review here; a fourth is an “unofficial companion” to
Moore’s most popular recent series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Lance Parkin’s Pocket Essentials volume on Moore is, like other works in the
series (which includes previous volumes on Philip K. Dick and Cyberpunk), a
reliable guidebook rather than a critical study. Parkin aims to demonstrate that
Alan Moore is not only a star in a constellation of creators, but “the best
writer of comic books there has ever been” (7). (With a 2001 imprint, Parkin’s
book is already out of date, an inevitable fate suffered by the detailed
bibliographies in Klock and Khoury as well, though the latter announces texts
that are still forthcoming.) Parkin reads Moore as unique, as do the other
celebratory volumes on Moore reviewed here. Serving as a volume of written and
comic tributes from colleagues, Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary
Gentleman has little critical value and yet demonstrates the esteem in which
Moore is held by at least two generations of comics creators. (Tributes from
figures such as Terry Gilliam and Michael Moorcock arrive from just beyond the
borders of the comics world as well.) The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, an
illustrated book-length interview, is a more substantial survey of Moore’s life
and work. Although the reclusive Moore rarely leaves his native Northhampton,
he’s hardly a reluctant interview subject, and his expansive views on his own
work are surprisingly objective: like the classic Hollywood auteurs, he tends to
emphasize his professionalism rather than the genius that others celebrate. Jess
Nevins’s Heroes and Monsters, a reader’s guide to the first volume (the second
was recently concluded) of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is an
unusually rewarding work given its modest origin as a series of factual
annotations to the comic’s many allusions to Victorian popular literature.
Featuring a preface by and interview with Moore (and comments from artist Kevin
O’Neill, confirming or denying his sources), Nevins frequently offers short but
illuminating lectures on Victorian history and popular culture. He must have
consulted many sources, but he doesn’t often cite these, and in a supplementary
essay on “archetypes,” that term and concept are used too loosely (among other
things, to discuss historical figures like the New Woman rather than the
“timeless” figures the concept otherwise evokes); little distinction is made
between these “archetypes” and mere stereotypes. Another supplementary essay on
“Yellow Peril” narratives is more informative, however; and an essay “On
Crossovers” is especially helpful in locating Moore’s work within a tradition
that includes mythology, realist novels, detective fiction, and sf from Jules
Verne to Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe stories.

Moore writes but has only rarely drawn comics. His work ranges from single Superman (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? [1997]) and Batman
(The
Killing Joke [1988]) stories to significant runs on the eco-horror title Swamp
Thing (1984-1987) and the career-defining series Watchmen (all for DC). He has
worked on the historical and independently published (by multiple publishers)
Jack the Ripper epic From Hell and the elaborate Superman pastiche Supreme
(1996-2000), as well as a half-dozen or so titles that constitute America’s Best
Comics (ABC), Moore’s own briefly independent imprint that was purchased—with a
promise of no interference—by DC. (Moore’s career is also marked by a number of
fascinating incomplete projects, in addition to live performances of music and
magic.) While some of Moore’s work has veered toward the underground and
experimental, his regular return to the treatment of the superhero as a social
problem (what would their political function be, if they really existed?) and
narrative concern (how should we continue to tell their stories?) defines his
career.

The really daring move of the auteur theory in the history of film criticism was
to bestow authorship on directors rather than screenwriters. While many comics
fans follow artists rather than writers, the prominence of Moore cannot help but
position the artists he has worked with (usually differentiated as pencillers,
inkers, colorists, and letterers) in the secondary role of illustrators of his
famously detailed scripts. In his most recent venture, the ABC line of comics,
Moore functions like an old-fashioned studio executive as well as scriptwriter,
working with a variety of artists who employ distinct styles. Although specific
collaborations have been the subject of debate in comics fandom, the theoretical
issues around authorship, and what remains an industrial model of collaboration,
remain unexplored. And like the early discipline of film studies, the critical
assumption (again, barely articulated) motivating these works on Moore is that
his high artistry can in itself lift a lowbrow, blatantly commercial artform.
Again, were this asserted of any popular form other than mainstream comics, it
would seem retrograde. It is certainly nothing new in the comics field: the cult
of the individual creative artist has always been central to the appreciation of
independent comics creators, from Robert Crumb to the Hernandez Brothers and
Chris Ware.

If, for Lance Parkin, Alan Moore is “the best writer” of comics, for Geoff Klock
he is a powerful poet who has established his position at the head of a
tradition of revisionary superhero narratives. Klock’s study, which mutates its
title from Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why (2000), draws also on Bloom’s
earlier work on the “anxiety of influence.” Klock seems to find the very idea of
applying the elitist Bloom’s ideas to pop culture a daring move; in fact,
directed towards recent superhero comics, his approach is invigorating. Revising
the common division of comic book history into a golden and then a silver age
(the latter inaugurated by the rise of Marvel in the early 1960s), Klock
identifies Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen (both
1986) as the inaugural texts in a third phase of “strong misreadings” of the
entire history of superhero comics. These much-discussed and well-known
revisions were widely but crudely imitated for a decade, but Klock traces a
“fourth movement” of revisionary superhero tales through an impressive canon of
texts that, unlike Miller’s and Moore’s 1986 work, remain largely unknown
outside of comics fandom. These include Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels
(1994, recently reprinted in a tenth anniversary edition), Busiek’s Astro City
(1995-present), and Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come (1996), which Klock
views as nostalgic attempts to retrieve the wonder of superhero narratives
undermined by Miller and Moore and especially their weak imitators. Klock
extends his investigation to Moore’s playful ABC line and effectively traces a
thread of increasingly self-reflexive revision into the popular but critically
neglected work of Grant Morrison (including surprising work on superhero teams
such as The Justice League of America [1996-2000] and The New X-Men
[2001-2004]). Warren Ellis (responsible for the serial mutation of Stormwatch
[1996-1998] into The Authority [1999-2000, but ongoing by others] and then
Planetary [1999-2001], provides Klock with his classification of Planetary as
“the comic book as literary critic” [153]). Such works, among others,
persistently interrogate the superhero narrative, often taking on the entire
history of the form. Klock’s application of Bloom is often heavy-handed, and his
rejection of such terms as “postmodern” or “deconstructionist” as “tedious” (3)
is too easy. His repetition of Bloomian terms (“strong” visions, etc.) retains a
macho air that affiliation with superhero comics only reinforces, allowing him
to consign interesting but “weak” revisions—work that another critic might term
“subtle”—to oblivion. James Robinson’s Starman (1994-2001) and Mark Waid’s
The
Flash (1992-1999) are examples of series that achieve their effects more quietly
than those which Klock celebrates for their boldness.

Klock nonetheless provides a welcome and helpful reader’s guide that newcomers
can safely rely upon: it’s not meant as an insult to suggest that the “reader’s
guide” could be the most useful part of his book. His brief but astute comments
on works such as Grant Morrison’s Animal Man (1988-1990, now collected) and
Doom
Patrol (1989-1993, still uncollected) make one wish he had given them full
treatment in his main text. Whether one accepts or winces at Klock’s debt to
Bloom, by concentrating on superhero comics Klock illuminates the work of
writers taking on the weight of decades of previous superhero narratives, or
what fans condense as “continuity.” Recent comics creators accept that any new
Batman, Superman, or X-Men story places itself in relation to all previous
stories in the history of those characters, as well as within the larger fields
of the DC or Marvel “universes” (which, for instance, locate Batman’s Gotham
City, Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island, and the far future world of the Legion of
Superheroes in a semi-coherent fictional world). The superhero genre itself is a
matrix of conventions and semantic structures that allows crossovers such as the
notorious 1998 meeting between the superhero team the Wild C.A.T.s and Aliens
(yes, those aliens, from Ridley Scott’s 1979 film), that efficiently wiped out
the superhero team. Plugging into the genre, many writers only repeat formulas;
but as Klock traces, in recent decades some writers have regularly used the
formula of the superhero comic to critically interrogate (and not just cynically
undermine) the form. He even admits that titles such as Ellis’s metafictional Planetary and Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s wickedly parodic
X-Force
(2001-2002, now mutated into X-Statix [2002-present]) make his own criticism
redundant, since these comics are themselves so self-reflexive. (Harold Bloom
himself is cited in an issue of X-Force as the thesis advisor of a graduate
student who is setting aside his career as a Walt Whitman scholar for the
celebrity life of a mutant superhero.) Klock’s attempt to elevate “strong”
comics writers is to some extent an attempt to rescue them from the genre, but,
as I’ve suggested, his study can be read, even against his wishes, as an
incisive demonstration of a fertile moment in a genre’s history—a period when
superhero comics commonly engage with the narrative and thematic concerns of the
best sf. Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan (1997-2002) may be, for example, as
Scott Bukatman has suggested, the key post-cyberpunk text that sf readers don’t
seem to know about, simply because it is a comic book. The same writer’s graphic
novel Orbiter (2003) may be one of recent sf’s most sincere attempts to revive
the heroic vision of NASA in the wake of the space shuttle Columbia’s breakup
upon reentry.

Along with Parkin, Klock apologizes for neglecting the visual element of the
comics he discusses. Both therefore undervalue Moore’s Supreme (recently
collected in two volumes from Checker Publishing), an homage and critique of the
figure of Superman that Parkin and Klock both see as less well-realized than the
thematically similar Tom Strong (1999-present) series for ABC. But Supreme, more
than its heir, depends upon a clever recreation of the visual style of earlier
comic books to depict its characters’ history and memories, a style that deepens
Moore’s scripts. Klock is often attentive to the visual components of the texts
he analyzes, but his literary bias leads him to find strong “visions” in the
plots rather than in the images of the comics he treats. More recently published
revisions of familiar superhero narratives are especially effective insofar as
their drawings rely on retro-cartoonish visuals rather than on the
hyper-detailed and computer-colored images that are DC and Marvel’s contemporary
house styles: James Sturm’s Unstable Molecules (2003) insightfully relocates the
origin of Marvel’s Fantastic Four at the intersection of 1950s politics,
science, and pulp sf imagery, while Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s audacious
Truth: Red, White, and Black (2002) recognizes that the first Captain America
(the product of medical experiments supervised by the US military) would have
been African American, not the famous WASP we have known in the role for so many
years. The work’s animation-like images provide a jarring juxtaposition with a
narrative that draws links between Nazi eugenics and the notorious Tuskegee
experimentation on African Americans. Such works fully exploit their status as
comics rather than as narratives that happen to be illustrated.

Overall, Klock’s study is a welcome and unapologetic attempt to praise Moore and
his progeny through critical analysis. Emphasizing the way in which contemporary
superhero comics engage the entire history of their form, Klock, whose book’s
title is less ironic than may at first appear, provides an intriguing way to
read texts that are still dismissed (by those who don’t read them) as
semi-literate fantasies for adolescent boys. Although his focus on “strong”
individual artists deflects attention from the generic conventions that also
sustain (and of course often inhibit) superhero comics, he also suggests,
perhaps unwittingly, ways in which sf fans and critics might reconsider comics
as increasingly significant components of the multimedia form of sf. In any
case, as Klock recognizes, comics are now willing to do the work of critics
themselves: when Alan Moore takes the often cheesy, blatantly commercial model
of the comic-book superhero team back to its Victorian origins in The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, the contemporary comic book effectively reestablishes
its generic contacts with Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo and H. Rider Haggard’s
Allan Quartermain before Moore’s heroes face an invasion by H.G. Wells’s
Martians. Science fiction may not know what to do with superhero comics, but
recent superhero comics apparently know what to do with sf.